Food and Friends
November 16, 2009
I have dear friends who have serious food issues. One of my close, long-term friends has made a lifelong tour of the outer edges of eating behaviors: raw food, Weight Watchers, no sugar/flour, before settling on Overeaters Anonymous.
She never learned to cook, never learned to put together a meal. Her refrigerator is pretty bare.
Luckily, she lives in Manhattan, where her children learned, at a very young age, to run downstairs and buy take-out.
I have another friend who takes the opposite approach: she prepares all her own food, carefully weighing each portion. If she goes to a restaurant, or to my house, she brings her dinner in a plastic container.
I love these women dearly. But we miss out on a lot by not being able to hang out in the kitchen, chatting over the cooking, and then relaxing over the eating. If I could wave a magic wand, I would make their food anxieties vanish in a puff of smoke. As it is, we settle for shared cups of tea, and decades of talk.
Mealtimes Matter Video
from Miriam Weinstein
About Miriam
Miriam Weinstein is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. As a journalist, she has won several awards from the New England Press Association. Her work has appeared in Boston Magazine, the Boston Globe magazine, Hope, and ParentSource. A former staff member for North Shore Weeklies and freelancer for Essex County Newspapers, she writes restaurant reviews and food columns as well as features on a wide variety of subjects. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with her husband and has two grown children.
The Surprising Power of Family Meals
In her book, The Surprising Power of Family Meals, Miriam Weinstein shows how this basic human institution helps nourish and strengthen our families today. You can buy this book from our friends at Smucker's® Online Store.
